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]Midge Ure: My family values
The Ultravox singer and musician talks about his family
Midge Ure: 'If my family hadn't supported me through my alcoholism, I don't know if I'd be here today.'
This is going to sound like a sob story but I was born in a one-bedroom tenement flat on the outskirts of Glasgow. It was pretty slummy and I was there for the first 10 years of my life. My brother and I slept in the bedroom. There was a cooker in a tiny little hole that connected the sitting room to the bedroom, and the sitting room had a sink in it that we used to bathe in. Opposite the sink was a thing called a cavity bed, which was like a hole in the wall with a mattress for my parents, and there was an outside toilet. I thought it was a fabulous place.
My father was earning just £6 a week and he scraped together half his weekly wages to buy me my first guitar. It was a secondhand dance-band guitar that I still have today. It must have been painful, but they must have known that it was more than just an, "I want, I want, I want".
To my parents, my proudest achievement was being the subject of This Is Your Life. I'd given up an engineering apprenticeship to be in a band and that was their ultimate job for me, so to see me walk away from that must have been very frightening for them. Then when the accolades and chart success came along it was phenomenal but, still, the pinnacle was This Is Your Life, because it was something they understood. The only thing that topped that for them would be the gong [OBE] from the Queen, by which point my father was gone.
I've got four daughters and I take my responsibilities as a father seriously. My eldest is 25, then I've got an 18-year -old, a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old.
I don't go off on tour for six months at a time any more. It was important for me when my first daughter was born to spend a lot of time at home being a parent.
When I was living in Glasgow it was a very bigoted city with the religious divides between Catholics and Protestants, Celtic and Rangers. But I ignored all of that, as music is completely neutral. So coming away with a reasonably sane head and trying to instil reason in my children was incredibly important, to the extent that none of them were christened. They can choose which religion they want to be. But I refuse to carry that particular gene through me. It doesn't go any further.
If my family hadn't supported me through my alcoholism, I don't know if I'd be here today. There are no excuses for it but my father had died, my career seemed to be going nowhere and you just lose sight of all the valuables that you have, and those valuables were my family. My children all know about it. The turning point came on a holiday. We were there supposed to be having a great family time and I went back to the car to get something. Of course what was in the car was a bottle of alcohol. As I turned round there was my then 11-year-old daughter looking at me and it was utterly heartbreaking and devastating to see the look on her face. Until then, I thought I wasn't harming anyone other than myself but obviously you're a pebble in the water and the ripples go a long, long way.
There's no point in doing what I do without a family there to share it with. Family is everything. You can be on stage in front of thousands of people one night and then get home the next day and you're at the supermarket getting the weekly shop or hearing all the stories about who does what to who at school and you think, that's it – that's my role in life. It's a much more important role than singing in a band.
• Ultravox's new album, Brilliant, is out now. To see them on tour in September and October, visit ticketmaster.co.uk
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